by Jerry Pinto
Abbé Pierre had no idea of the demons he had let loose with his words. I believe he would have been horrified had he known, but he did not know and I did not tell him. But before it got very bad, I moved again, this time to study at the renowned Ecole Internationale at Geneva. For the next five years, I studied in the English and the French sections simultaneously, and enjoyed myself tremendously. The students were a mixed bag, of course, and among them was Ahmed Khajjar, a pimply-faced youth with a shaggy head of hair, who fell ‘madly and extravagantly in love’ with me. He was living with his mother who was the exiled queen of the Khajjars of Iran and we took the same tram together to school. Each day, he would be waiting for me, his huge spaniel eyes full of a mournful devotion.
One day, he said he had written a poem for me. I was quite touched until I read the poem: ‘Mary had a little lamb …’ it began.
‘I wrote it for you,’ he said.
He had only written it out for me but who was I to argue with such an eloquent token of devotion? His mother sent a very polite letter to my mother. It said, in effect, that Ahmed had promised to study better if I would marry him. My mother was startled by this. I was only fourteen at the time and Ahmed probably not very much older, although he was a form behind me in school since he had been detained.
But my mother insisted I go and see her. In the middle of all the paraphernalia of émigré royalty—Persian carpets, antique silverware, drawn curtains—sat Madame la Princesse. She asked me for my hand in marriage for her son. I looked into her world-weary eyes and tried to decide whether she was serious. She seemed to be.
‘Madame la Princesse,’ I said carefully, ‘I cannot marry him but I can try to help him to study.’
I thought it might be a good thing for us to go for a walk in the woods so I could figure out why Ahmed was doing so badly in school. In hindsight that might not have seemed such a great idea—taking a lovesick young man for a walk in the woods—but Ahmed behaved beautifully. He kept telling me dreadful stomach-turning stories about his father and his powers. It seemed his father would cut off the heads of various prisoners and see how long they could run around without their heads. Perhaps he was warning me of the consequences of turning him down.
Finally, I asked him what his problem was with his studies. I knew he wasn’t unintelligent.
‘I’m not interested,’ he said. I tried to reason with him but he stuck to his position. He was not interested so he would not study. A few days later, my mother was reading the newspaper at breakfast. The Tribune of Geneva and Le Monde both carried stories that Ahmed had died when a private plane crashed. It was sad, I thought, and I hoped that wherever he had gone, he would find something to interest him.
An hour later, the doorbell rang. I went to open it. There stood Ahmed, a look of expectancy on his face. He looked at me and his face crumpled.
‘You thought I was dead,’ he said, ‘and you’re not crying.’
He marched past me into the sitting room where my mother looked up, intrigued.
‘Oh mon Dieu,’ she said. And then, ‘Journalism is not what it used to be. The newspapers have it that you have died in a plane crash, Ahmed.’
‘You’re not crying either,’ said Ahmed, even more hurt.
‘I should cry because you are alive?’ asked my mother, somewhat confused. He had planted the news in the hope that I would discover the error of my ways. I was indeed upset to think of a friend dying but I had not gone into a decline, as Ahmed no doubt hoped.
When I was fifteen years old, I finished at Ecole Internationale and I was to go to Oxford. My father and mother were going back to India so we went to Paris and we began to dismantle our lives. One day as I was walking down the steps that connected the Avenue Camoëns to Avenue Théodore Roosevelt, I saw a familiar but somewhat woeful face.
Ahmed!’ I said.
‘Hello, Leela.’ he said.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, although I had an inkling that I knew.
We sat together on the steps and I tried to explain that we were too young, that I was going back to India, and no, he couldn’t follow, and that he should go back to his mother.
He looked at me, his heart in his eyes.
‘Oh Ahmed,’ I said, ‘all you need to do is find out what you want to do. If you don’t want to study, don’t. But find something you want to do and you will do it.’
Then I left him, sitting on the steps. Many years later, I discovered that he had moved back to Iran and become one of the finest documentary filmmakers there. He named his daughter Leela. It is a compliment I treasure.
‘L’Ecole Int’ as we all learnt to call it had a system of mentoring for new students. When I joined, it was deemed that I did not need a ‘pilot’ because I had come to Geneva before, I spoke French, I knew my way around, I had been ‘acclimatisée’. But then Virginia, a Jewish girl whose father was a British businessman, arrived and I was given charge of her. According to the tradition of the school, she was meant to invite me to her home for dinner at the end of three months, as a token of her gratitude, I suppose. And so one evening a blue Cadillac drew up outside our home and I was whisked off to dinner in a penthouse apartment with a view of Lake Geneva.
Unfortunately, it did not seem that the family was accustomed to money. Virginia was not interested in the view or in the historic city with its great concerts, operas, ballets, and theatre in several languages. She lived with her grandmother and the old lady wanted to show me how the cupboards lit up when they were opened. I exclaimed dutifully over the illuminated interiors. Should one need to dress in the middle of the night, what a blessing that would be, to have a cupboard with a built-in light. Of course, one could put on the bedroom lights too, but to mention this would be to deny the old lady her joy so I tried to look interested. But when she kept opening and shutting the cupboard doors, I am afraid my appreciation began to get a little mechanical.
We sat down to dinner, the three of us in a huge room, served by a butler. The napery was damask, the cutlery was sterling silver but the food was unimaginative and indifferent. Of course, there was caviar. It was then the ultimate status symbol. Virginia insisted on Melba toast and she insisted that hers be buttered on both sides. She daubed huge amounts of caviar on the toast. And then a chicken stew arrived in a white flour sauce. It was pure stodge, but then the trifle that rounded off the meal was sweet stodge.
‘And now,’ announced Virginia, ‘I am going to show you my father’s office.’
‘Ooh!’ I thought to myself. ‘Will I be able to control my delight?’
We went into an office that looked as if it had been wheeled off a Hollywood set. There was a huge desk and armchairs and books by the yard and heavy drapes.
And on the table, there was a lamp.
The shade was the colour of old parchment.
‘What do you think that is made of?’ asked Virginia. I had no idea but I was sure she was going to tell me.
‘Human skin,’ she said triumphantly.
I looked at her, disbelieving.
‘It’s from Auschwitz,’ she said.
My disbelief grew.
‘You don’t believe me?’ She asked. ‘Look.’
She turned the lamp slowly. On one side, there was a number. It was a number they tattooed on the arm of each person who entered a concentration camp like Auschwitz.
I felt my gorge rise. I turned and I ran, right out of that penthouse, out into the street and home. I threw myself at my mother and wept in her lap until I felt slightly better. I was glad that I did not need to talk to Virginia again.
But of course, that did not mean I could purge racists from my life, not even when I was the daughter-in-law of a rich family that had every comfort at its command. They were always there, hovering in the background, dreadful people who let unimportant matters—such as the creed into which you were born or the colour of your skin or the shape of your nose—determine their responses to you.
At the time, I was still marrie
d to Tikki Oberoi and we were travelling en famille in America. One evening in Washington, Rai Bahadur Oberoi announced that he would like to go to a self-service cafeteria to see how the system worked. The next morning, Rai Bahadur, my mother-in-law, Tikki and I left the hotel in which we were staying and set out to find a cafeteria. We had breakfast there but only after the Rai Bahadur had satisfied his curiosity about how the orders were processed and how everything was kept moving.
When we finished, I went out to find us a taxi. A taxi pulled over and parked at the kerb. I explained to the rather elderly driver that we would have to wait a few moments until the other passengers came out of the cafeteria. He was very polite about it.
Just then a huge car came barrelling around the corner and scraped the taxi. Then the driver stood on his brakes, stopped with a screech of rubber and jumped out of his car. He was a large white man. He took a look at the taxi driver who happened to be black and began to heap the most frightful racist abuse on him. In between, he assured the driver that he would make sure he was sacked, that the driver was one of those people who should be.
I couldn’t bear it. I stepped around the car and said in as cold a tone as I could manage while still being polite. ‘Excuse me, but I saw what happened. The taxi was stationary. You were in motion. You are at fault. And if you insist on taking this further, I will be glad to be a witness.’
Unfortunately, we were leaving the next day for India. So I wrote down my version of events and signed it. Then I gave the driver my address and told him that I would be willing to answer any questions that either insurance company might have. A few days later, I did get a questionnaire that the insurance company wanted me to fill out. I filled it out and sent it back.
And a few weeks later, I got a letter of thanks from the driver. I didn’t need to be thanked. I was glad to do what I could. After all, I was no stranger to racism. I spent a good part of my life in India, home to any number of racisms. It is not enough that we have a caste system which has brutalised both upper and lower castes for centuries, oh no. India has other racisms as well. One of our most important values is how much melanin your skin has.
When Dom and I began work on his population book, A Matter of People, one of our first stops was Calcutta. There we were to meet Mother Teresa, apostle of the poor, saint of the slums and the woman who had used every weapon in her power, including her considerable charisma, to keep the Catholics from using contraception.
Dom took a dim view of this but I thought she was just a Roman Catholic nun, part of the hierarchies of the Vatican, and subject to its diktats. When we met, their dislike was instantaneous and mutual.
‘Come and pray with me,’ she said. Dom refused to do any such thing. I went with her into a spartan chapel with a cement floor on which she kneeled to pray. We prayed together and Dom paced the floor on the veranda outside.
Then she came out and said, ‘You go. Leave Leela with me.’
‘Certainly not,’ Dom snorted. Not unsurprisingly, she did not find mention in A Matter of People. But I thought Dom had allowed his personal animus to get in the way of quite an interesting story.
When the Vatican finally agreed that to use the rhythm method was not a mortal sin, when it was finally agreed that women should do complicated sums, Mother Teresa’s volunteers went out to help the poor and the downtrodden Catholics of Crematorium Street understand the method. It is not an easy method. It uses the menstrual cycle to predict the woman’s most fertile time of the month—that is when she is most likely to become pregnant. Once she has identified her fertile time, she is supposed to abstain during that period.
Since many of them were illiterate women, the Church had decided that the best way to teach them would be to give them bead necklaces of different colours. They were supposed to string the beads using different coloured beads for fertile days and for other days. Mrs Lovejoy—and the other volunteers like her who fanned out into the slums, including the biggest one at Pilkhana—was supposed to distribute these necklaces and make sure that they were used. And yet everywhere we could see evidence that it was a method that was failing. There were many children in every home and many of these were ill-fed and hungry. In other homes, the necklaces had broken and the different coloured beads had been restrung haphazardly. In some homes, the children were playing with the beads. Some women kept their beads in their little puja niches behind their clay images of the Devi and simply hoped that she would do their counting for them. And the children continued to be born.
Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity did not seem to be living up to their name in their treatment of Mrs Lovejoy. She received a bag of wheat flour (which I estimated would contain about five kilos of flour), a kilo of sugar, a packet of tea and some kerosene oil every month. There was no milk, no rice and no vegetables. She was also given a stipend of Rs 200 a month, which was not sufficient to feed and clothe herself, her unemployed husband and their five children. To pay so little to a woman who was a qualified nurse seemed to me to be absurd but Mrs Lovejoy of Crematorium Street kept on working. She defined commitment and she never complained.
I was amazed at her resilience, at her courage and at her persistence. So we invited her and her family to dinner. The family ate circumspectly since Mrs Lovejoy made sure she ordered enough but not too much, but I could see that the little ones were almost getting drunk on the food. She told us that she would like another job. I thought she would do well as a housekeeper in the Park Hotel in which we were staying so I talked to the manager about her.
He agreed that she seemed to be the perfect fit and he also said that he had a vacancy for a housekeeper. Then he asked to meet her. I knew her sincerity and her simplicity would impress him. But when I asked him what happened, he said, ‘Madam, we could not hire her.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Madam, we thought with a name like Lovejoy, she would be fair.’
‘Fair?’
‘Yes, like an Anglo-Indian. But she was too dark.’
Before we accuse other nations of racism, we should examine our own consciences. In a way, caste is another terrible form of racism. This was brought home to me one day in Delhi, when I found my Domestic help, Anguri, weeping.
I waited until the tears had abated and then asked what the matter was. She told me that she lived by the banks of the Yamuna, in what was then called a Harijan settlement. They had bought the land at a public auction held by the Indian Railways, collecting the money by selling almost everything they had, pawning their jewellery and even—and this for the poor is a terrible sacrifice—selling their goats. They had managed to buy it because no one else wanted it. It was seen as unusable land, usar land. But over the years, they had cleared it, removing pebbles and stones by hand, mixing dung and compost waste into it, so that now it was ready for the humble ragi (millet) crop with which they hoped to feed themselves.
And as soon as the land was arable, another group had moved in, with tractors and buffalos. The animals would graze on the young plants and the tractors would finish what was left. The police were in cahoots with this group, and every time the Harijans protested, the police moved in. They would arrest the men and throw them into gaol for nine days, declaring their scythes as weapons. The women would get six days. This meant a further loss of labour wages while their fields were being ravaged.
‘Tell me when they come next,’ I said.
But first I needed to understand what was going on, so I called our friend, Jag Parvesh Chandra, a man who knew more about Delhi and its communities than most people had forgotten.
‘This must be an upper-caste group,’ he said. ‘It’s almost always a caste issue.’
One evening Anguri told me that the men had threatened to return under cover of night.
‘How do I get there?’ I asked.
She was aghast. ‘Bibiji, please don’t come. You don’t know these men. They can do anything. They have guns.’
I thought she was exaggerating. Later that nigh
t, I took a cab and counted three bridges.
‘There is no path down from the bridge, bibiji. You will have to clamber down or slip and slide down,’ Anguri had said. I could see that she was right.
From the bridge I could see four tractors. I asked the cab to wait and raced down the slope.
‘Who are you?’ I thundered at them.
There was a surprised male rumble from behind the lights of the tractors. As my eyes got used to the light, I could see that the men were indeed carrying rifles. I do not remember fear. I only remember my outrage.
‘This is not your land. These people have bought it from the government and they have tended it. You will go back now.’
There was some surprise at this but not enough. I needed to turn on some big guns. I put on my best ‘maharani manner’ and announced that I was going to make a full report to the tahsildar of the Railways and to Mrs Indira Gandhi who was a personal friend.
When the tractors began to back off, I heard another car draw up on the bridge.
‘Leela?’ I could hear Dom’s voice. ‘Is that you?’
‘Down here,’ I shouted.
Dom made the cab driver help him down the slope and he arrived cursing and swearing at the bottom. ‘What are you doing here?’ He asked.
I explained. He looked like his question had not been answered.
The next day, I sat down and wrote a long letter to Mrs Gandhi. Whatever her faults, she was not slow to take decisions. The next day I was notified by the PMO, the prime minister’s office, that I was to go with the tahsildar of the Railways and identify land for a new settlement.
And so one Leela Naidu and one tahsildar went off with some land records, chugging along in an inspection wagon. This was basically a bench on wheels that could seat four. It had a back, a seat and the arms ran out in front and behind as handles that six men, three on either side, were pushing. On this contraption, we went chugging into Uttar Pradesh, looking for likely land.
At one point, a bunch of men leapt out of the fields where they had been waiting for us. They were armed with sticks. The tahsildar made a Dash for it and hid behind a bush. I drew myself up to my full height and said, ‘Yesterday, they had guns and I survived. You have brought sticks? Tahsildar saahab?’